How do judges of the Supreme Court of Alabama reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Alabama / Joined 2007 / Served to 2011

Sue Bell Cobb

Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama

Sue Bell Cobb was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, who joined the court in 2007. She previously served on the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1956 · age 70
Tenure: 2007–2011 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–
2007	Supreme Court of Alabama	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Cobb authored 654 published opinions for the court (1995–2011), plus 139 dissents and 136 concurrences. Most cited: Ballenger v. State (137 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 523 of these were attributed to Cobb by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1998	Ballenger v. State	720 So. 2d 1033	137
2003	Boyd v. State	913 So. 2d 1113	134
1999	Boyd v. State	746 So. 2d 364	129
2007	Ex Parte Essary· Dissent†	992 So. 2d 5	118
2000	Taylor v. State	808 So. 2d 1148	118
1997	Burgess v. State	723 So. 2d 742	105
1998	Roberts v. State	735 So. 2d 1244	97
2002	Hamm v. State	913 So. 2d 460	91
2003	McGahee v. State	885 So. 2d 191	88
1998	Owens v. State· Concurrence†	728 So. 2d 673	66
1996	Brooks v. State	695 So. 2d 176	63
1999	Pressley v. State	770 So. 2d 115	61
1998	Nettles v. State.	731 So. 2d 626	61
2008	Holiday Isle, LLC v. Adkins· Dissent†	12 So. 3d 1173	60
2010	Espinoza v. Rudolph	46 So. 3d 403	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 930 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Supreme Court of Alabama reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Sue Bell Cobb on?: Sue Bell Cobb was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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4 years on the Supreme Court of Alabama. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).